I tried to play this without reading hints and see how far can I get. And I think this game doesn’t need a tutorial per se, it just need to gate some mechanics behind progress.

The mechanics are actually quite intuitive, you just need to know they are there. The biggest culprit here is inversion mechanic, which is incredibly easy to miss. So if runes we locked at the beginning and needed to be unlocked, or if first the first few requests went like “Luck -> Luck + Poison -> Misfortune -> Misfortune + Regeneration”, it would naturally guide the player to those mechanics.

And once you get it, the gameplay becomes incredibly fun (ignoring some much needed QoL features and the issue with mouse sensitivity, of course).

Overall, it’s a quite enjoyable concept for an incredibly interesting idea.

Wow nice idea you've got there. Brewing potion by combining ingredient that you could not see, that can also change property depends on how you view and manipulate them? Brilliant! This is the sort of unique games that I would like to see in a game jam, and you did that perfectly.

I would say the lack of tutorial does pull the game back a little bit, especially during the start that you just don't know what to do. In these types of game it would always be nice to have the first tutorial level hand-holding the player, just to learn the basics of the game. (As long as the intention was not to force the player find out by themselves that is). Also, the room need to be a bit smaller as bring things a bit closer together. The room felt too empty at the moment and that just doesn't match the "workshop" tone you are going for. 

There is also a slight issue that my camera was moving tooooooo slow to the point where I need at least 3 strokes before I can turn and face the bell, which add a bit of frustration to me as a player. I guess some kind of mouse sensibility slider would be nice.

Anyway, good job!

This game took a lot of understanding and I'm very thankful to Varii for explaining things to me in Discord. I had a lot of issues with the game but I'm super happy I got to understand and play it. The mechanics are awesome!

So let me just get all the negative out of the way first 90% of this is due to a lack of tutorial. This is going to seem really harsh but trust me it'll be followed by praise.

I wasn't a fan of having to download the windows version to get a working experience even then the Windows version has no way of quitting or mouse settings so it was quite difficult to navigate and close the game.

I was SUPER confused about what to do. Even after reading the tutorial on the game page it was difficult without the dev answering my questions in Discord. I didn't realise I had to open activate the table with a reagent in hand for it to work. I was originally throwing it into the cauldron first. The page does say to do this though so that's on me.

The fact that the reagents all have this wispy/mist effect rather than their actual shape made it a hassle trying to figure out which ones were which without picking them up and taking them to the table. In addition to this there's no readout that tells you the current values of the shape either when being held in the shadow table or after it's added to the mixture.

The game also doesn't explain what makes a potion unstable and the way to fix this. Or the reason/fix for the side effects. Both which lower the value of the potion due to the customer complaint. The solution being that any effect that was +5 or -5 (I think?) becomes unstable and the side effects need to be countered by mixing in other reagents with the opposite effect.

With no readouts on any of the current effects it becomes a very difficult mental task to balance and remember what you have in your mixture and what you need to balance out.

Also not knowing what effects the shapes gave via the shop menu was a bit irritating as I had to just buy them and look at them one at a time to figure out what did what.

With all that being said. Once I knew all this (Thanks again Varii) the potion/shadow system is absolutely fantastic. I want a full game with this system so that I can run a potion shop and sell them to customers using this system. It was SUPER satisfying once I figured it all out and my biggest complaint is that it was so easy to unlock the other reagents and make money once you knew how it all worked!

There wasn't much to comment on art-wise minus the things I've already explained. The NPC portraits didn't work for me at all regardless of the version but the 3D models were fine. The shadow table and the rune effects were cool and the shadow movement/rotation etc was all really nice.

There wasn't any music but the ambient cave sounds/dripping fit the scene well and the SFX were all fitting and nice.

I know It seems like a very negative review but I genuinely loved the systems on display and I hope I get to see them again in the future in a more developed (and well documented) fashion.

Really sucks that the shadow system did work properly in the WebGL build (I had a similar thing happen with my game). I think the camera has a couple improvements too, there isn't any limit to the rotation so you can keep looking upwards until you're upside down haha. A cool concept for the game though, it's just unfortunate that it didn't play out.

The style and atmosphere are pretty great tbh! The controls are a bit unwieldy! Good concept <3 Well done!

A bit clumsy controls but overall addicting game. Thats an awesome idea you came up with. Maybe with some more polishing it can become a serious project. Good job!

• Was able to rotate the camera upside down, quite disorienting, might want to add a clamp on that (or a min/max)
• Did not know a first that you needed to hold a ingredient to be able to use the rune table

Clearly and unfinished game, though similar to your inspiration described in your GDD, this is the kind of gameplay, that if executed well, can be really fun.

Good job on what you have made so far